Attitudes Towards Europe : Language in the Unification Process

An innovative collaborative research project conducted jointly at Durham University and the Istitut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, Germany. It focuses on the study of public debates on economic and political integration of Europe, in both Britain and Germany and how these debates have developed in the post war period up to the 1990s. The following topics are investigated: Euro-discourse and the new media, British national identity in the European context, representations of Germany in the context of European integration in Margaret Thatcher’s autobiographies, European debates in post-World War II Germany, the European debate in and between Germany and Great Britain, the career of the neologism Euro in German Press Texts and the metaphorization of European politics. The study links to Internet implications, providing the basis for further contrastive and comparative research on public discourse in the field of European politics.